bilingual computer games of the present

here in the future nearly everyone in the first world has a computer, or access to one. they've been smaller, cheaper and more sociologically important than we imagined in the past.

like in the past, computers can be tedious and annoying, but they're still mostly fun and fascinating.  they're also a LOT easier to use now ... easy enough that you don't need to be able to program to use them -- the vast majority of users don't even know how.

there are tons of games and millions of ways to waste time socially, both with friends and people you don't even actually know, but here's one of my favorites ...

we now have software tools letting you translate from one language to another.  they're extremely fast, taking only fractions of a second to do a change, and can translate from-and-to all the major languages in the world.  (english, by the way, has become widely used -- in a large part because of its pervasiveness in rock n' roll, believe it or not.)

these translators are also sublimely inaccurate.  you can almost always tell what something means, but the translations are riddled with funny and/or bewildering errors.  and this, in turn, lets you play a game ...

you can take a sentence, translate it to another language and translate it back to see how far afield the translation has gone ...

for example, the sentence:

tomorrow i will ride my bike to school

in spanish becomes:

i mañana en mi bicicleta a la escuela.


but when translated back is:


i am on my bike to school.


so the game you can play is to translate something back and forth between languages until the sentence never changes in english, then show someone that sentence and have them guess what the original sentence was before it went insane.  now sure, i'm the first to admit this isn't the funnest game to ever be invented in the future, but you have to believe me here, it's not the worst (and it's way better than most of the stuff shown on future TV -- a medium so poor that i don't even watch it).


so after translating a sentence back and forth out of icelandic (and don't wig out -- nobody lives there, even in the future -- i just use the language because i can) here's my final draft ...


all d4rw1n to do is give me three oranges, a rabbit and basketball and I will take him to be the greatest man never born.


before you guess, i'll give you a hint.  here's the same sentence finalized with a different translation program (and believe it or not, this stuff in the future is all free -- you don't even have to check it out of the library or anything ... this time i'm switching back and forth between russian):


entire d4rw1n must make in order to give to me 3 oranges, rabbits and basketballs and I [rasmotrim], which was large always oh persona.


don't be fooled by "you get what you pay for."  here in the future there's a lot more free stuff and a lot of it's good -- this just happens to be a bit of a soft spot.  (and no, i have no explanation for the [rasmotrim] comment -- that word means as much to me here in the future as it did in the past ... which is to say, nothing.)


think think think.  what could it be?  well the first one is actually pretty close.  here's my original sentence:


all d4rw1n has to do is give me three oranges, a rabbit and a basketball and i will consider him to be the greatest person ever born.

in closing, as we say in english-japanese-english, "And the reader who becomes the thought and love, I acquired favorite farewell value from future."